Electricity is one of the most common and important commodities that is consumed by most of the households, industries, shopping-complexes and sports complexes etc. The demand for electricity is growing faster than any other form of energy in all parts of the world. This increasing need is making electricity generation the single largest and fastest rising contributor to carbon dioxide emissions. These trends clearly indicate the need for building technology solutions that reduces the electrical load consumed by number of electrical appliances. Further as the consumption of electricity is increasing gradually, it is essential to monitor and take precautionary measures to conserve the electrical energy for betterment of the future. Thus, measurement of energy consumed by different loads in any electrical environment is required.
In the present scenario, there are numerous techniques available in the art that enable measurement of energy consumption in a given premise. One of the techniques known in the art is measuring composite load using device such as a Smart Meter. The Smart Meter generally refers to a type of advanced electrical meter that identifies consumption of the power by the multiple electric loads in the environment collectively. The Smart Meter, when deployed at consumer location, is configured to sense the load consumed by one or more appliances used by the consumer to generate a consumer load profile in real-time. The consumer load profile is an aggregation of the load drawn by the various appliances at the consumer location. However, the Smart Meter typically generates a report depicting the information of the energy consumed by entire nodes or appliances collectively. Therefore the Smart Meter is not feasible to monitor and identify the energy consumed by a specific individual appliance. In general, the technique of identifying the individual appliance and the usage patterns of the identified appliance from a composite electrical load is referred to as electrical load disaggregation or composite load disaggregation.
In the background art, several techniques have been proposed implementing the composite load disaggregation. In one of the known technique in the art, the user or moderator has to manually switch ON/OFF each individual electrical appliance to get the signature of that appliance for disaggregation. In another technique, an intermediate monitoring device is inserted between the socket and the appliance to record its operation. This technique is generally called “intrusive” monitoring. In this technique, one has to acquire recording devices or sensors equivalent to the number of appliances installed in the customer premises. This method is considered as inconvenient and expensive for large-scale deployment as it requires use of separate measurement devices such as recording devices or transmitters or sensors to measure the electricity consumption. However, the use of multiple metering devices distributed throughout the building leads to overall increase in installation cost that invariably increases the complexity and is also cumbersome to handle.
Thus, in view of the above and several other drawbacks in the art, there is a need for a method and a system that enables the optimization of electrical load disaggregation by identifying the electrical individual appliances and their usage patterns in a non-intrusive manner and also alleviating several other drawbacks in the art.